An American pastor held on espionage charges in Turkey, the focus of an intensive campaign by top United States officials seeking his freedom, was moved from jail to house arrest on Wednesday because of health concerns.

Andrew Brunson, a 50-year-old evangelical pastor from North Carolina, has been held for more than a year and a half in a case that has aggravated already tense relations between Turkey and the United States, longtime allies. He is one of 20 Americans who were charged after a failed coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2016.

President Trump spoke to Mr. Erdogan by phone about the case, and posted a message on Twitter last week urging the Turkish leader to “do something” to free the pastor.

On Wednesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also took to Twitter to say that while the United States welcomed the “long overdue news that Pastor Brunson has been moved from prison to house arrest,” the measure was “not enough.”

“We have seen no credible evidence against Mr. Brunson, and call on Turkish authorities to resolve his case immediately in a transparent and fair manner,” Mr. Pompeo wrote.

Just last week, a court in Turkey’s western Izmir Province upheld an earlier decision to place Mr. Brunson in jail while he awaited the continuation of a trial on charges of terrorism and espionage. His lawyer appealed the decision, citing unspecified concerns over Mr. Brunson’s health, according to the semiofficial Anadolu news agency.

On Wednesday, the same court ordered Mr. Brunson released into house arrest until his trial resumes in October. The court ordered him to wear an electronic bracelet at all times and barred him from traveling outside the country.

Footage of a car carrying Mr. Brunson, accompanied by a police escort, was shown live on television as the pastor was moved from a prison in Izmir to his home. He was later seen entering his home.

Mr. Brunson could face 35 years in prison if found guilty of having links to two groups Turkey considers terrorist organizations: a movement led by the American-based cleric Fethullah Gulen — whom Turkey accuses of initiating the 2016 coup attempt — and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party.

Mr. Brunson, who has done missionary work in Turkey for 23 years, worked with his wife at a small Protestant church in the city of Izmir, on the country’s Aegean coast. He has denied any links to terrorist organizations, and says he eschews politics in his work.

The American Center for Law and Justice, an organization representing Mr. Brunson’s family, said in a statement on Wednesday that it looked forward to his ultimate return to the United States. It applauded Mr. Trump for pursuing his release.

“This is a critical first step that we believe will result in the freedom of Pastor Brunson so he can return to the United States and be reunited with his family,” Jay Sekulow, the group’s chief counsel, said in a statement.

Officials advocating for Mr. Brunson’s release believe that resolving his case could signal an improvement in relations between the countries. The Turkish authorities have suggested handing Mr. Brunson over to the United States in exchange for Mr. Gulen’s extradition to Turkey to face charges in the coup attempt. The Americans have rejected requests to extradite Mr. Gulen.

The United States Senate last month temporarily blocked the sale of F-35 fighter jets to Turkey because of Mr. Brunson’s imprisonment and Turkey’s purchase of a Russian air defense system.

A pro-government columnist, Abdulkadir Selvi, said in a televised comment that the dispute over Mr. Brunson had “reached a point that it was poisoning the relationship between the United States and Turkey.” Of the pastor’s move to house arrest, he said, “This is a step.”

Mr. Selvi said that now it was the United States’ turn to take “a step” to improve the relationship, alluding to Mr. Gulen.

The UN report and Erdogan’s rhetoric both evidently expresses the Muslim world’s thoughts about what it apparently thinks should be the fate of Israel and Europe. So far, not a single Muslim state has condemned or opposed Erdogan’s aggression against Judeo-Christian civilization.

The enemy is already inside the gates; many European regimes seem unaware that there is even a threat.

The logic of much of Europe’s religious and political community seems to be that if the elephant in the room is spoken to nicely and made to look cute and adorable, people will not think of it as a threat to their safety.

The Western world can no longer ignore the latest elephant in the room: Islamic imperialism. Europe has gone so far as to hamper free speech on the subject, apparently preferring to put the safety of its citizens at risk over admitting that the elephant exists.

Meanwhile, Muslim countries make not the slightest effort to hide their intentions, as recent actions of 18 such states at the United Nations illustrate. They cooperated in the preparation of the report released in March by the U.N. Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (UNESCWA), which accused Israel of “the crime of apartheid,” despite knowing full well that such a baseless claim would be rejected by the world body now that Donald Trump is at the helm of the free world. The reason they went ahead with it anyway was to convey to the West that delegitimizing the Jewish state was merely the first step in a master plan to unravel all of Judeo-Christian civilization and values.

For a body such as UNESCWA to declare the State of Israel in an official Institute’s report, as being guilty of “the crime of apartheid” according to international law, shows that Islamic expansionism is a real and an active political problem.

UNESCWA must have had some idea, before publishing the report, that such a loopy conclusion could not be adopted, even by the UN, which has been doing its utmost to rewrite historical facts. In the last few years, UNESCO has repeatedly declared pre-Islamic historical sites Islamic.

Nevertheless, UNESCWA proceeded to pass this surreal political concoction, probably to declare to the Western world again its attempts to delegitimize the State of Israel and all the freedoms it represents in the Judeo-Christian world that might threaten the expansion of Islam.

It was an attempt to project power.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, which even before his new, absolute powers, wanted to represent all of Sunni Islam, shows to the Western world the true face of Islamic imperialism and the conventional, irregular and cyber war it appears to have declared on the Christian world.

The UN report and Erdogan’s rhetoric both evidently expresses the Muslim world’s thoughts about what it apparently thinks should be the fate of Israel and Europe. So far, not a single Muslim state has condemned or opposed Erdogan’s aggression against Judeo-Christian civilization.

ANKARA, TURKEY – APRIL 17: Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan gives a referendum victory speech to his supporters at the Presidential Palace on April 17, 2017 in Ankara Turkey. Erdogan declared victory in Sunday’s historic referendum that will grant sweeping powers to the presidency, hailing the result as a “historic decision. 51.4 per cent per cent of voters had sided with the “Yes” campaign, ushering in the most radical change to the country’s political system in modern times.Turkey’s main opposition calls on top election board to annul the referendum. OSCE observers said that a Turkish electoral board decision to allow as valid ballots that did not bear official stamps undermined important safeguards against fraud. (Photo by Elif Sogut/Getty Images)

According to Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs Mevlut Cavusoglu, “[T]here will soon be religious wars inside Europe”. The enemy is already inside the gates; many European regimes seem unaware that there is even a threat.

Corrupted elites, with the help of many in the international community, try to suffocate Israel economically; and the biased and dishonest media seem to be trying to hide from the public that they work as proxies of Islamic imperialism, promoting Islamic ideology and condemning the values of the West.

Pope Francis and Greek Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew use Jesus’s phrase “Love each other as I have loved you” as a religious justification to love people who are ordered — under threat of eternal hellfire — not only never to love you, but to have nothing whatever to do with you, apart from trying to win you over to their firmly-held belief:

“O you who have believed, do not take the Jews and the Christians as allies. They are [in fact] allies of one another. And whoever is an ally to them among you – then indeed, he is [one] of them.” — Qur’an 5:51

The logic of much of Europe’s religious and political community seems to be that if the elephant in the room is spoken to nicely and made to look cute and adorable, people will not think of it as a threat to their safety.

Left-wing ideologues and unwitting fellow travelers hide the nature of the elephant. This was the approach of President Obama, who, along with European leaders, provided space in which the elephant could operate, grow and undermine the fabric of Western societies.

Key to this enabling has been a Western focus on fake politics — such as the obsession with issues such as transgender bathrooms and rights for women who are already blessed with rights — while Islamists are actually oppressing gays and women in the most rigid fashion.

Christian leaders have also been trying to deflect from the threat. Both Pope Francis and Greek Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew I use Jesus’s phrase, “Love each other as I have loved you” to disguise and minimize it.

Meanwhile, the elephant in the room gets bigger and bigger and is ready, according to the Turkish president’s statements, to destroy the house.

The West seems addicted to prettying up terrorist organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood or the PLO. Wishing away danger is nothing new to the West. It was not until President Ronald Reagan exposed the Soviet Union as an “evil empire,” for example, that the threat of Communism began to be taken seriously. Within six years, the USSR collapsed.

The behavior of many Western political leaders, jumping from one definition to another about the “true nature of Islam,” has so far been disastrous. The tenets of Islam are there or all to see; people in the West seem not to want to look.

What are we Westerners doing trying to tell Muslims what their religion is, in the first place? Do they try to tell us what “real Christianity” is?

Sadly, too much of what we have seen of Islam in the West has been violent. Countless attacks, with shouts of “Allahu Akbar” have been claimed in the name of Islam. In terms of what their religion stands for, you at least have to give them credit for being forthright. We in the West are the ones who have lied.

Ultimately, if we do not confront this problem, this problem will confront us.

Seven of the jihadists who murdered 130 peoples and injured 360 more in Paris last November had just come to Europe as Muslim migrants. Did the nearly 500 victims of these jihadis reach the “lowest levels of human degradation”? Or do they not count because they don’t fit Francis’ narrative?

What about the “lowest levels of degradation” that will be reached by the victims of future jihad massacres and their families — jihad massacres perpetrated by Muslim “refugees”? Do they have any place in the Pope’s moral calculus at all? Apparently not.

“It is hypocritical to call yourself a Christian and to chase away a refugee, or anyone who needs your help.” Is it hypocritical to chase away someone who is trying to kill me and destroy my nation, culture, and civilization? Is being a genuine Christian tantamount to approving the suicide of Europe and the West? That appears to be the Pope’s view.

Pope Francis kisses the foot of a man during the foot-washing ritual at the Castelnuovo di Porto refugees center, some 30km (18, 6 miles) from Rome, Thursday, March 24, 2016. The pontiff washed and kissed the feet of Muslim, Orthodox, Hindu and Catholic refugees Thursday, declaring them children of the same God, in a gesture of welcome and brotherhood at a time when anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiment has spiked following the Brussels attacks. (L’Osservatore Romano/Pool Photo via AP)

People who call themselves Christians but do not want refugees at their door are hypocrites, Pope Francis said Thursday, amid reports of new tragedies involving migrants crossing the Mediterranean.

“It is hypocritical to call yourself a Christian and to chase away a refugee, or anyone who needs your help. Jesus taught us what it means to be a good Christian in the parable of the Good Samaritan,” Francis said in a meeting with German Lutheran pilgrims at the Vatican.

The pope, a vocal champion of migrant rights who was born in Argentina from an Italian immigrants, earlier issued a message ahead of the World Day of Migrants and Refugees, which the Catholic Church will observe on January 15.

“Children are the first among those to pay the heavy toll of emigration, almost always caused by violence, poverty, environmental conditions, as well as the negative aspects of globalization,” Francis said in the message.

Renewing arguments that welcoming migrants is a Christian duty, the pope cited a passage from the Biblical Book of Exodus stating: “You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

He criticized attempts “to curb the entrance of migrants, which in turns fosters illegal networks” for people smuggling and trafficking, “instead of favouring the social integration of child migrants, or programmes for safe and assisted repatriation.”

Francis said governments should balance their right to control migration flows “with the duty to resolve and regularize the situation of child migrants,” saving them from abuse, exploitation and the “lowest levels of human degradation.”…

Western “mainstream media” and academia continued to exonerate Islam in deceptive op-eds, such as the Huffington Post’s “ISIS Violates The Consensus Of Mainstream Islam By Persecuting Christians,” by Qasim Rashid, a recipient of Saudi largesse, by way of Harvard University’s Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center.

A 12-year-old girl, raped by an Islamic State fighter, was told that “what he was about to do was not a sin” because she “practiced a religion other than Islam.”

“In school I only learned about Islam. Parts of our teaching were about destroying Christianity. So we did what we learned, by attacking Christians … Our teachers would tell us every time there was a new church in town and we were told to go and attack the people and destroy the church. So that is what we did.” — Tofik, a former Muslim cleric who converted to Christianity.

Throughout the month of August, the Obama administration and the so-called mainstream media kept insisting that Islam does not promote the persecution of Christians — all the while ignoring the direct testimonies of those who have undergone it.

All the statements [by U.S. government and media] have not condemned strongly what damage it [persecution of Christians] is doing. What they are saying is just “This is not the true Islam. This is violating the picture of Islam.” The issue for them is the image of Islam, but none of these statements speak about the victims, about what has been done to the victims, they are not even mentioned. And that is one of the questions our people have. [Author’s emphasis].

Warda added that persecuted Christians are “being denied visas, while others who have participated [in the violence] or at least were silent, can go.”

Father Douglas al-Bazi, an Iraqi Catholic parish priest from Erbil, who still carries the torture scars he received nine years earlier at the hands of jihadis, denounced the Western refusal to accept reality about Islam:

I’m proud to be an Iraqi, I love my country. But my [Muslim] country is not proud that I’m part of it. What is happening to my people [Christians] is nothing other than genocide. I beg you: do not call it a conflict. It’s genocide… When Islam lives amidst you, the situation might appear acceptable. But when one lives amidst Muslims [as a minority], everything becomes impossible…. Wake up! The cancer is at your door. They will destroy you. We, the Christians of the Middle East are the only group that has seen the face of evil: Islam.

The rest of August’s roundup of Muslim persecution of Christians around the world includes, but is not limited to, the following accounts:

Islamic State: Savagery and Sex Slavery

Mokhls Youssef Batk, an Iraqi Christian, was blinded by the Islamic State (ISIS or IS) after he refused to convert to Islam.

The “caliphate” threatened that captive Christian women would become sex slaves unless they were ransomed with money. It posted images of three Assyrian Christian women who were previously abducted. The women hold pieces of paper on which their names and a date — July 27, 2015 — are written: “It is feared they will be sold to ISIS fighters if a ransom is not paid for them.”

A 12-year-old girl, raped by an Islamic State fighter, was told that “what he was about to do was not a sin” because she “practiced a religion other than Islam.” IS also made clear in a 34-page manual released by its Research and Fatwa Department that “sex with Christian and Jewish women who were captured in battle is also permissible.”

Jihad on Muslim Converts to Christianity

Uganda: After he learned that his family had converted to Christianity, a Muslim man went berserk. Issa Kasoono beat, strangled, and left his wife for dead. He also severely beat their two teenage sons for the crime of apostasy. The youngest son managed to flee and bring help from the church where, three months earlier, the Muslim mother and sons had accepted Christ. Due to injuries from the strangling, Kadondi, the mother, lost her voice, has difficulty eating, and requires extensive surgery. According to a local source: “The mother and Ibrahim [older son] Kasoono were seriously injured. Ibrahim was hit with a blunt object, had his right arm broken and has stomach pains, while the mother was strangled and sustained neck and throat injuries.” Although Uganda’s population is 85% Christian and 11% Muslim, attacks on converts to Christianity are on the rise, and include the recent murder by poisoning of a mother, and the gang rape of a teenage daughter of a Christian pastor.

Somalia: A Muslim convert to Christianity (name withheld) managed to escape from Al Shabaab — the dominant Islamic front — but only after the jihadis chopped off four fingers from his right hand while interrogating him about his conversion. Another man, 31-year-old Sharif, fled his home after his conversion to Christianity was exposed: “My association with a visiting white missionary landed me in trouble… I feel sad because I cannot see my family, because if I return back to Somaliland, then the government will arrest me.” His wife and four children — aged 8, 6, 4, and 1 — have also relocated to an undisclosed town: “I am not sure what will happen to my wife and four children. I am praying that God will provide for their basic needs. Pray for me that one day I will see them.”

Pakistan: Khurram Naveed, 33, a Christian man, and Sobia, 25, a Muslim woman, are on the run. Sobia discovered Christianity through Khurram and decided to be baptized. Since they got married and had two daughters, her parents, Muslim neighbors, and imams have repeatedly tried to convert them to Islam or face the consequences. In the words of Khurram:

“Since we got married we have had to change places many times… Wherever we go, people ask about my beloved wife’s conversion. Sometimes, imams try to force us to convert to Islam, issuing terrible threats…. My wife, I and our children have had to flee from place to place. We feel threatened as soon as people find out about my wife’s Muslim past. However, running from one place to another is not easy. There are so many problems…. Until now I have to change job six times, and finding new employment is not easy. But we need security for our life and we ask for help from the people of God.

Horn of Africa: A former Muslim cleric, who converted to Christianity and is known as Tofik, explained in an interview what Islamic preachers teach about Christians in mosques and what such converts can expect. For the previous 24 years, he had trained to become an imam at an Islamic madrasa: “In school I only learned about Islam. Parts of our teaching were about destroying Christianity. So we did what we learned, by attacking Christians once we finished our training.”

Tofik said he was taught that Christians are evil and that he and other students should steal from and kill them: “We beat them, attacked the church and burnt their Bibles. … Our teachers would tell us every time there was a new church in town and we were told to go and attack the people and destroy the church. So that is what we did.” Due to a series of dreams, he eventually embraced Christ. News of his apostasy spread quickly, especially among his own tribe:

They reacted by coming to my home saying, ‘This brother is dead.’ In our culture, when someone dies their property is shared. So they destroyed my house, setting it on fire, and they took my cattle, and the remainder of my property. They then falsely accused me of burning another house, so I was jailed and taken to court. It was only in the court process that the witnesses proved their dishonesty by having contradicting testimonies.

After being released from jail, Tofik continued preaching Christ and even inspired more than 200 people to convert:

“As a result local villagers were upset. So again, they attacked me physically and burned my house…. The attackers assumed I was dead, so they threw me into the compound. Then they looted the small kiosk I owned and proceeded to loot and burn my children’s properties. They said they have killed the lead figure and now our area is free of his activities. They started shouting and singing.”

Jihad on Christian “Blasphemers”

Egypt: Medhat Ishak, a 35-year-old Christian, was arrested for handing out Bibles to Muslims outside El-Arab Mall in Sixth of October City. Mall security guards turned him over to national police, who accused him of evangelizing. The day after his arrest, a judge amended the charge against Ishak to “defamation of a revealed religion” and ordered him held for 15 days. After his term ended, the judge extended his detention for another 15 days. Ishak’s attorney, Rafik Rafaat, suspects the judge will keep extending the detention order, in violation of Egyptian law, until the case falls out of the public eye. Then he will hand Ishak a prison sentence of one to five years, in accordance with the defamation charge. This is because there are currently no charges against “evangelism” under Egyptian law. Handing out Bibles or even promoting Christianity does not constitute “defaming” Islam. “The word ‘blasphemy’ means that he was insulting the other religion [Islam], but he didn’t do that, and he didn’t talk about Islam or prophets or anything like that to be accused of blasphemy,” said the Christian’s lawyer. “So, now we are surprised that the attorney general accused him of blasphemy when he did not commit any act of blasphemy.”

Pakistan: Protestant Christian Pastor Aftab Gill and three other Christians from Gujrat were accused of blasphemy for having used the word rasool (“messenger” or “apostle”) during an event made public by their community, the Biblical Church of God. Local Muslims grew angry, saying that, as rasool is one of the Muslim prophet Muhammad’s attributes, Christian use of the word is blasphemous. But Christian activists say that because the word simply means apostle and appears in Urdu Bibles as such, it was used in that generic sense, and that the Christians were not trying to blaspheme. Muslims were nevertheless about to burn Christian homes and a church, but police managed to restore calm before the situation escalated. Unitan Gill, Pastor Aftab’s younger brother, said that local Muslim businessmen are jealous of the Christian family’s success in running a local grocery store, and that it was Muslim grocers who brought this matter to the attention of the police.

Islamic State Destruction of Syrian Churches

The Islamic State “caliphate” released a video showing its militants razing the ancient Mar Elian monastery to the ground. In the video, the jihadis can be seen removing the remains of Saint Elian, after whom the monastery was named, from their ancient stone sarcophagus, and then gleefully desecrating his bones. The church was built on the spot where Saint Elian was killed by his father, a Roman officer, for refusing to renounce Christ. Earlier, IS abducted an estimated 250 Christians from the monastery and its surrounding villages, many of whom were women and children.

Islamic State jihadists in the midst of destroying the ancient Mar Elian monastery in Syria.

On Sunday, August 23, a rain of mortars fell on a Damascus neighborhood. Two shells hit the roof of the Maronite church. Nine people were killed and about fifty were wounded. A nearby Catholic parish was also damaged. According to Maronite Archbishop Samir Nassar, “Part of the war in Syria is to live under indiscriminate bombing, a kind of Russian roulette which is always unpredictable.” Survivors tell the archbishop that those who die are better off, because they “will not have to see and live this cruel tragedy without end.”

Pakistani Dhimmitude

The Christian minorities of the “Land of the Pure” continued to be treated as third class, unwanted “citizens.”

Muslims attacked and severely beat a Christian family after a Muslim boy mocked a Christian boy by saying that his pregnant sister-in-law will “give birth as their cows and buffalos do.” The Christian boy reciprocated with an insult, and the Muslim boy began to beat him. Later in the evening, the Muslim boy and his brothers went to the Christians’ household and attacked the entire family. While beating the pregnant Christian women, they yelled, “You cannot be pregnant without permission of Muslim master who pays you.” After visiting the family, a human rights group stated that the “Christian Community is facing all sorts of discrimination and disgrace from their land Lords, neighbors, or where ever they live or work. Christians have no right to respect, education, free living and now they are under observation/mockery of giving birth, now our majority brothers [Muslims] will decide whether the Christian women will give birth respectfully or like animals.”

As torrential flooding spanned across various regions of Pakistan and washed away thousands of homes, Christians in Kasur received little humanitarian aid and were left to starve. Their two options — to receive help from Muslims or the government — was either to convert to Islam or willingly accept becoming modern-day slaves. According to Wilson Chowdhry, the president of the British Pakistani Christian Association, while Muslims in the region have benefited from temporary shelter, clean water and food provided by governmental agencies and Muslim charities, Christians have been left without those bare necessities and medication needed to fight illnesses. Said Chowdhry:

We are aware that this community has previously been offered aid from Muslim charities if they convert but they never accept conversion. They hold strong to their faith. They believe God will be their provider. These families have literally been struggling without food. Churches have opened up their doors but can’t provide them much aid because the churches themselves in the region are struggling. We are talking about a very rural part of Pakistan.

Chowdhry added that as desperation started to get the best of the Christian population in Kasur, many ended up signing bonded labor contracts in order to receive aid from Muslim landlords.

In a separate incident, a few days after a Christian man stopped two Muslim brothers from harassing Christian girls on their way to church, the two brothers broke into the Christian’s home, and beat and shot him. The man was later taken to a hospital, where he was reported in critical condition.

Boko Haram’s Slaughter of Christians

Jihadists from the Islamic organization Boko Haram slit the throats of sixteen Christian fishermen on the shores of Lake Chad in the Nigerian state of Borno. The increase in such incidents is supposedly in retaliation for the Chadian government’s efforts against Boko Haram around Lake Chad. According to Bishop Ramolo, “The Chadian President Idriss Deby has declared open war against the Islamists, and these acts represent an attempt at revenge.”

A Christian leader, stabbed in April by rampaging young Muslims in Kaduna state, suffered a relapse after an initial recovery. Pastor Emmanuel Danjuma of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, while visiting a Muslim-majority region of Nigeria, was attacked by Muslims reportedly angry about election results. “They called me an infidel and attacked me.” The pastor was clubbed and stabbed several times. A village elder apparently ordered the youths to stop. “I don’t know what happened then, as next I found myself in a hospital in Saminaka town. After a few days, my situation deteriorated and I was transferred to this Christian hospital.”

About this Series

While not all, or even most, Muslims are involved, persecution of Christians is expanding. “Muslim Persecution of Christians” was developed to collate some — by no means all — of the instances of persecution that surface each month.

It documents what the mainstream media often fails to report.

It posits that such persecution is not random but systematic, and takes place in all languages, ethnicities and locations.

As organizations like CAIR and their allies wax indignant over “Islamophobia” in America, Muslims around the globe are visiting the worst sort of cruelty upon the Christian minorities in their midst.

For instance, over a span of four days, from October 19-23, the Indonesian government succumbed to the demand of Islamic “extremists” and demolished nine churches. Six days earlier, on October 13, Muslims unleashed a torrent of violence that left a church burned to the ground and a person dead.

And in the course of this single day, 8,000 Christians found themselves displaced from their homes.

The government has deported them.

According to a local church activist, someone who self-identified only as “Rudy,” Islamic militants issued an ultimatum to the Indonesian government: Either raze these Christian churches to the ground or “the radicals will deploy around 7,000 people” to besiege this Christian community.

The organization Open Doors, a group dedicated to “serving persecuted Christians worldwide,” reports: “Church members wept as they watched in despair [as] civil police officers [began] hammering down their worship houses.” As of this juncture, over 1,000 “churchless believers are prohibited from raising temporary tents to hold Sunday worship services.”

The predominantly Islamic country of Bangladesh is a place where Christian women are regularly subjected to unspeakable violence. Open Doors states that “two out of every three women in Bangladesh will experience gender-based violence in their lifetimes.” Furthermore, the United Nations’ “Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women” has found that “girls are regularly harassed and abused on their way to and from school,” a phenomenon that is the function of the fact that “sexual harassment is often seen as ‘part of the culture.’”

One young woman who has fallen victim to this culture is Susmita Chambugonj. Back in May, the 20-year-old was assailed by five “youths” who dragged her into a microbus. While inside, Susmita was raped by two of her abductors.

The current “refugee crisis” has hit Syrian and Iraqi Christians particularly hard. Open Doors informs us that Christians in these countries “have had their homes marked by ISIS,” and “some come from historically Christian towns that were obliterated.” Moreover, some Christians are discovering “that they are being discriminated against when it comes to receiving aid.”

In Africa, stories of Islamic-on-Christian oppression are even more grisly. At the same time, these same stories supply us with proverbial textbook exhibitions of Christian heroism.

Earlier in the year Boko Haram paid Habila Adamu a visit at his home. When the militants informed Habila that they were “looking for him” in order to end his life, he replied that he had been looking for them as well—but in order to share with them the Gospel of Christ.

The predators weren’t impressed. When Habila refused to recant his faith, his persecutors shot him in the face and left him for dead.

Thankfully, Habila survived.

Joshua, however, did not. Joshua was 18 years old. A member of a family of farmers, he worked in a factory during the dry season. One day, Islamic militants showed up at his place of employment and proceeded to separate those employees who were Muslims from those that were Christians. Then, they wasted no time in murdering the Christians one by one.

Initially, Joshua was in another room with some other employees. They watched through a window as the mass murder unfolded. When an Islamic woman and fellow employee of Joshua begged the latter to deny his Christianity, he refused. Joshua was blunt: “No,” he told her, for “I am a Christian and they are killing my brothers.”

Joshua continued: “I am also going out there. I am not going to stay here and pretend that I am a Muslim.”

Joshua was martyred along with nine young men.

Even as I write this, the Christian community in Turkey has become the object of a systematic, relentless campaign of death threats. According to Open Doors, the targeted are being blasted for being “heretics” who have “chosen the path that denies Allah[.]”

In Pakistan this past July, Saddique Azam, a veteran school teacher, was promoted to the position of “headmaster” at an elementary school. Azam is a Christian. For months, he was repeatedly threatened by Muslims who believed that the office of headmaster should be held by a Muslim. Azam refused to resign.

Then, on October 6, three of his Islamic colleagues who worked under him physically attacked Azam.

Azam recounted his experience: “Three Muslim teachers entered the school, went into my office and waited for me there. When I entered the office, I was alarmed to see them. I asked them the reason for the visit and they launched a tirade of warnings against me to withdraw and resign from teacher headship.”

From the beating, Azam sustained a severe injury to his left eye. Things could’ve been worst had it not been for other staff that stopped the assault.

But witnesses reported that while they pummeled Azam, his Islamic assailants mocked him by referring to him as “choora,” an anti-Christian epithet used by Pakistani Muslims. “Choora” connotes the “sweeper” or “untouchable” caste. “You are a ‘Christian Choora,’” his victimizers shouted. How, then, “can you be a headmaster and be given seniority over us?”

The next time that we hear about the “Islamophobia” that Muslims in America allegedly face, let’s recall the face of real religious persecution: the persecution that truly defenseless Christians suffer at the hands of Muslim aggressors throughout the Islamic world.

(Still, many European Christians seem to have few problems with Islamic murder of Jews in Israel. — DM)

“Convert or Die” — Graffiti on a restaurant, Gothenburg, Sweden.

“Very religious Muslims are spreading the following idea throughout the refugee centers: Sharia law rules wherever we are.” – Gottfried Martens, pastor of a south Berlin church.

“You have a cross on — then you are also a Christian f***ing whore. Do you know what we do to people like you? … You get stoned [to death].” — Muslim threats against Christians in Denmark, documented by TV2.

A British Christian family that was attacked says both police and the Anglican Church have failed to provide any meaningful support and are “reluctant to treat the problem as a religious hate crime.”

Christian residents of Europe continue to be persecuted, often by Muslims allowed into Europe on the grounds that they are being “persecuted.”

As Muslims grow in numbers, so do their demands — assimilation in Europe is falling by the wayside.

“Before we put on a show of unity with Muslims, let’s have them begin by respecting our civilization and our culture.” — Giuseppe Berlin, Municipal Councillor of Cinisello Balsamo, Italy.

Last April, police in Sicily reported that Muslim migrants hurled as many as 53 Christians overboard during a recent boat crossing from Libya. The motive was that the victims “professed the Christian faith while the aggressors were Muslim.” Another report cited a boy seen praying to the Judeo-Christian God. Muslims commanded him to stop, saying “Here, we pray only to Allah.” Eventually the Muslims “went mad,” in the words of a witness, started screaming “Allahu Akbar!” [“Allah is Greater!”] and began hurling Christians into the sea.

Even when Christian refugees make it to the West, they often continue to be persecuted by Muslims, their fellow “refugees.”

According to a September 30 report, in Germany “Many Christian refugees from Syria, Iraq or Kurdistan are being intimidated and attacked by Muslim refugees. In several refugee centers set up by the local authorities, Sharia law is being imposed, and Christians — which are a minority — are the victims of bullying.”

Gottfried Martens, pastor of a south Berlin church, said that “very religious Muslims are spreading the following idea throughout the refugee centers: Sharia law rules wherever we are.” Martens expressed especial concern for Muslims who convert to Christianity — apostates who, according to Islamic law, can be killed: “There is a 100% chance that these people will be attacked.”

Earlier, in July 2014, the weekly Die Zeitexplained how “an atmosphere of intimidation and hostility towards Christians” reigns in the refugee centers. Christians, referred to as “pigs,” have limited access to communal kitchens. Local authorities said, “The police have reached their absolute breaking point. Our officials are increasingly being called to confrontations in refugee homes.”

The situation is the same in other European nations. Last Tuesday in Gothenburg, Sweden, Markus Samuelsson, of Assyrian descent, found the walls of his restaurant covered with jihadi graffiti. These included the messages: “Convert or Die” and “The Caliphate is Here.” The Arabic letter ن (“N” for “Nasara,” or “Christian”) was painted on the walls of the pizzeria next door and the local bakery as well, though non-Assyrian businesses were left untouched. (The Islamic State is known to mark out Christian homes and businesses with this letter before attacks.)

A July report told of how two small families of Christian asylum seekers were harassed and abused by approximately 80 Muslim asylum seekers from Syria. The Muslims — described by one Swedish newspaper as “fundamentalist Islamists” — and the Christians resided in the same asylum house. As in Germany, the Muslims ordered the Christians not to use communal areas and not to wear crosses around their necks.

After extensive harassment and threats, the Christian refugees, who thought they had escaped ISIS, left the Swedish asylum house “fearing for their own safety.” A spokesman for the government migration agency responsible for their center said:

They dared not stay. The atmosphere became too intimidating. And they got no help… They chose themselves to organize new address and moved away without our participation because they felt a discomfort.

Asylum seekers in the Swedish city of Kalmar, where Christian refugees were forced to move out of public housing after being harassed and threatened by Muslims.

In Denmark, according to the conclusion of a study conducted last year, “Christian asylum seekers are repeatedly exposed to everything from harassment to threats and physical abuse by other [Muslim] refugees in the asylum centers, simply because they have converted from Islam to Christianity.” An eight-year-old Christian boy was repeatedly bullied and beaten by larger Muslim boys on his way to school, to the point that he dropped out. In another incident, someone tampered with a Christian asylum seeker’s bicycle so that he crashed and broke both hands.

According to Niels Eriksen Nyman, who led the study:

There are certainly many more cases around the country than the ones we hear about in the church. I hate to say it, but I’m afraid that on some of the asylum centers there are some very unhealthy control mechanisms when the staff turns their back… I refuse to support Islamophobia, but we have a serious problem here.”

It certainly seems so. After all, such persecution is not limited to refugees. Christians of Middle Eastern or Asian backgrounds who have been living in the West for years are also being targeted.

In Muslim-majority areas of Denmark — voted 2013’s “happiest country in the world” — Christians of Middle Eastern backgrounds experienced “harassment, verbal attacks and in some cases direct violence from Muslims,” according to TV2. One Christian, “Jojo,” born in Denmark to Lebanese parents, said that Muslims sometimes surround and bully her about her Western attire. When one of them noticed she was wearing a cross, he said “Well, you have a cross on — then you are also a Christian f***ing whore. Do you know what we do to people like you? Do you know what we do to people like you? You get stoned [to death].”

Another Christian woman of Iranian background in Denmark recounted how she and her son are harassed on the Muslim-majority block where they live — and where she stands out for not wearing a hijab, the Islamic veil: “My son is being called everything. I get called all sorts of things. Infidel. Filthy Christians. They tell me I ought to be stoned to death. My son was beaten at the bus stop. He was called pig, dirty potato (Muslim slang for Danes), and that ‘you and your mother should die.'”

Similarly, in the United Kingdom, a Pakistani man, his wife, and their six children are suffering “an appalling ordeal at the hands of neighbours who regard them as blasphemers.” Their “crime” is converting to Christianity — over 20 years ago. Despite being “prisoners in their own home after being attacked in the street, having their car windscreens repeatedly smashed and eggs thrown at their windows” the Christian family says both police and the Anglican Church have failed to provide any meaningful support and are “reluctant to treat the problem as a religious hate crime.”

The family plans to relocate from their home city of Bradford to a “white English” area to escape the hate campaign. Nissar Hussain, the father, said: “Our lives have been sabotaged and this shouldn’t happen in the United Kingdom. We live in a free democratic society and what they are doing to us is abhorrent.”

Other refugees who convert to Christianity are snatched back to Islam. Last year, in New Zealand, friends of a Muslim convert to Christianity known as Daniel said they “fear the refugee has been abducted from his Christchurch flat and taken back to Saudi Arabia — home to the Islamic holy city of Mecca — where it is against the law for Muslims to abandon their faith.”

Daniel arrived about five years ago on a Saudi government scholarship to study English, eventually converted to Christianity and applied for asylum. He was granted refugee status on the grounds that he would be persecuted in Saudi Arabia, and told friends he was terrified he would be kidnapped and forced to return. According to the Sunday Star-Times, “his friends … say he was last seen in the company of two strange Arab men and believe he was taken out of the country under duress, possibly by agents of the state or family members. … There have been numerous documented cases of Saudi nationals being uplifted from foreign countries.” In one case, a man who converted to Christianity and was brought back to Saudi Arabia was told “more than once if he did not renounce his Christianity that he could expect to be beheaded.”

Even Europe’s indigenous Christians and their churches under attack by the “refugees” as well:

Italy

Last May, a Muslim schoolboy of African origin beat a 12-year-old girl during school because she was wearing a crucifix around her neck. The boy, who had only started to attend the school a few weeks earlier, began to bully the Christian girl — “insulting her and picking on her in other ways all because she was wearing the crucifix” — before he finally assaulted her. Italian police did not charge the boy with any offense, citing that he was a minor.

On Sunday, May 10, after mass at church, a group of young Muslim immigrants interrupted a Catholic procession in honor of the Virgin Mary. They shouted insults and threats as the group passed in front of the Islamic Cultural Center in Conselice, a small town in lower Romagna. Approximately 100 Catholic Christians, including several small children, were preparing to receive their first Holy Communion.

On New Year’s Day, a 67-year-old Moroccan man, heard mumbling verses from the Koran, used an iron rod to hurl to the ground and severely damage five statues — including of the Virgin Mary, Joseph, and the Christ Child — and destroy the altars and baptistery in the parish church of Santa Maria Assunta in Cles, Trentino.

On January 9, in the chapel of St. Barnabas in Perugia, as a man was kneeling in prayer before a statue of St. Mary, while holding a photograph, presumably of someone he loved, five “foreigners,” described as being of North African descent, attacked him: “The first thing they did was rip the photo from his hands. Next they unleashed their hatred against the image of the Virgin Mary. They broke the statue to pieces and then urinated on it.”

On January 17, a crucifix was destroyed in Cinisello Balsamo, a municipality in the Province of Milan, near a populated mosque. The municipality’s Councillor, Giuseppe Berlin, did not mince words about the identity of the culprit(s): “Before we put on a show of unity with Muslims, let’s have them begin by respecting our civilization and our culture. We shouldn’t minimize the importance of certain signals; we must wake up now or our children will suffer the consequences of this dangerous and uncontrolled Islamic invasion.”

France

On April 15, a man dressed in traditional Muslim attire damaged and desecrated Christian gravestones and crosses in the cemetery of Saint-Roch de Castres (pictures here). The prosecutor said, “The man repeats Muslim prayers over and over, he drools and cannot be communicated with: his condition has been declared incompatible with preliminary detention.” He was hospitalized as “mentally unbalanced.”

Less than two months later, during the early morning of August 5, at Thonon-les-Bains, a man of about 30, described as a “young Muslim,” committed major acts of vandalism in the church of Saint-Hippolyte and in the adjacent basilica of Saint-François-de-Sales. He overturned and broke two altars, the candelabras, and lecterns; he destroyed statues, tore down a tabernacle, twisted a massive bronze cross, broke some stained-glass windows and smashed in a sacristy door.

Austria

After reportedly listening to Muslim chants, a man, known only as Ibrahim A., went on a church-vandalizing spree and desecrated four churches. He overturned and destroyed statues, crosses, and altars. The Archbishop of Vienna described the attack as “so far the worst act of vandalism in my time as Archbishop…. I am shocked by the devastation in the churches. I hope that the perpetrator or perpetrators did not know what they were doing.” Ibrahim A., 37-years-old, was caught in the act of vandalizing St. Stephan’s but was released at the time because police did not realize it was one of many attacks that had been carried out that day. Police have been unable to find him since then.

Germany

A Turkish man being treated in a hospital attacked his nurse because there were “too many crosses” on the wall. According to Mainpost, a German publication, “A 34-year-old went to St. Joseph Hospital … due to a ‘gastro-intestinal flu.’ Suddenly he refused to be treated, because he thought there were too many Christian crosses on the wall. Because of the crosses, the man started insulting the nurse, calling her a bitch, fascist, and the like. Then the man, according to police report, also started becoming physically aggressive. The hospital called the police. The officers seized the man in front of the hospital and checked him.”

United States

Last year in Columbus, Indiana, three churches were vandalized on the same night. The words most frequently sprayed were “Infidels!” and “Koran 3:151.” The verse from the Koran states, “We will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve [or “infidels”] for what they have associated with Allah [reference to Christian Trinity] … And their refuge will be the Fire, and wretched is the residence of the wrongdoers.”

Australia

Last year, a report said that “Church-goers in Sydney’s west have been left shaken after a stranger shouted death threats from a car bearing the Islamic State flag. The car drove past Our Lady of Lebanon Church at Harris Park on Tuesday and witnesses claim it had a flag similar to those brandished by Islamic State jihadists hanging out the window.” A church official said the people in the car threatened to “kill the Christians” and slaughter their children: “They were strong words and people were scared of what they saw.” Witnesses saw a flag outside the window with the words, “There is only one god and Muhammad is the prophet.”

Islamic hostility for Christians remains the same. Just as they are hounded in Muslim majority nations, Christian refugees from the Middle East and even longtime residents of Europe continue to be persecuted — often by Muslims allowed into Europe on the grounds that they are being “persecuted.”

According to what I call “Islam’s Rule of Numbers” — which holds that as Muslims grow in numbers, so do their demands — assimilation in Europe is falling by the wayside.

As millions more Muslims continue to flood the continent, they will not be limited to expressing their anti-Christian hostility on the unprotected dead in cemeteries, or on inanimate church buildings, statues, and crosses. Rather, as in the Islamic world, native Christians themselves will be hounded even more.

That is exactly how the “Muslim world” — most of which rests on lands that once were Christian, then taken by Muslim jihad — came into being.

(The church will be dedicated to those murdered by the Islamic State. In what other Muslim nation would that happen? — DM)

YouTube via NBC News

President al-Sisi has asked Christians for a greater commitment in politics, urging them to vote and to run for office, to ensure a Christian presence in Parliament.

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In the coming days, construction will commence on a new church in Egypt dedicated to the martyred Coptic Christians beheaded by the Islamic State in Libya in February.

The new church, bearing the name “Church of the Libyan Martyrs,” will be built in the Minya Governorate, south of the capital, Cairo. The church will cost $1.3 million, half of which has already been raised.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi granted permission for the construction of the church last February after Islamic State militants murdered 21 Coptic Christians on a Libyan beach.

According to Father Rafic Greiche, spokesman for the Catholic Church in Egypt, the construction is indicative of a slow but noticeable shift taking place in Egyptian culture as well as among state officials. The change comprises improving attitudes toward Christians, but also resistance to Islamic extremism.

Until now, Fr. Greiche said, the procedure involved in getting a church building permit was extremely complex, involving a series of authorizations and approvals, which have been streamlined in this case. The decision also indicates that the government wished to send a strong message against religious discrimination, he said.

Greiche says that there have also been timid attempts at exegesis of the Koran and Islamic texts, accompanied by a ban on women teachers wearing a burka in the classroom and struggles against fundamentalism and extremist sermons in mosques.

Last week, the president of the University of Cairo, Dr. Hossam Kamel, prohibited teachers from wearing the burka in the classroom. They may continue to wear it, if they choose, at home or on the street, but not during teaching time.

Egypt’s top Islamic school, Al-Azhar, followed suit by banning women from wearing the burka in all its affiliate schools after a leading cleric said the burka was only a “tradition” and not necessary in Islam.

With general elections in late October and a possible reform of the Constitution, some expect a greater presence and visibility of Christians in society and in national politics as a result. While a transformation of the mentality naturally takes time, Greiche said, the fact remains that Christians are far more accepted in Egyptian society now than in the past.

President al-Sisi has asked Christians for a greater commitment in politics, urging them to vote and to run for office, to ensure a Christian presence in Parliament.

The High Electoral Commission also decided that at the first stage of the elections on October 17, women wearing the full veil must show their faces if they want to cast their vote.

For some time, there has been a greater determination to limit fundamentalism and extremism in mosques. The priest spoke of a “greater secularism without renouncing the religious element.”